


Not Wrong

by Whookami



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Homophobic Language, Period-Typical Homophobia, Slice of introspection, Steve Harrington Has Bad Parents, Steve Harrington-centric, implied racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28821369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whookami/pseuds/Whookami
Summary: Sitting on the cold dirty floor of a movie theatre restroom, Steve wants nothing more than to make things right. How do you even begin to do that when you’ve spent your entire life only learning how to be wrong?
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Comments: 3
Kudos: 36





	Not Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> I found this piece buried in my phone’s notes, gave it a quick slap of paint, and am releasing it into the wild. There are a lot of homophobic slurs brought up in Steve’s memories, but that’s really the only warning this needs. I hope you enjoy and I’d appreciate any feedback you feel like giving!

  
  


He can hear his dad calling him in his mind. “ _Stephen. Stephen, come back here!”_ The voice is as clear as the memory associated with it, clipped, brittle, and wielded like a whip, a sharp crack of command laced in every syllable. 

Vaguely he’s aware of Robin’s sheepish expression, the way her eyes dance from his own and skitter away nervously, like she can’t bear to hold his gaze for more than a second. She also looks kind of nauseous, which, considering why they’re sitting on the restroom floor in the first place, is a definite possibility. Steve isn’t about to pretend he’s _that_ dumb though. She isn’t sick from the drugs right now, or from the danger they’d just been through. Robin is sick because of the expression she sees on his bruised and swollen features. He can practically feel her drawing away from him emotionally, ready to pull herself back into her safe sarcastic bubble where Steve’s opinion can’t hurt her. 

He wants to say something, anything, to get rid of that fear, that look that speaks of a lifetime of waiting for the rejection that is surely to come. 

His father growls again harshly from the back of his mind, pulling his face into a thoughtful frown as familiar words come back to him from over ten years before. 

“You aren’t to see that boy any more, Stephen.” His father’s words held no chance of leeway, no opening to try and argue against them. “I know his type. Weak. Undisciplined. The way his parents coddle him, it’ll serve them right when he turns out to be a _queer_.”

Steve tilted his head, perfectly styled hair flopping over his forehead the moment it had a chance to break free. With a scowl his mother raked her long nailed hands through his bangs, trying to settle them back neatly again. His hair poofed up at the rough ministrations, defying any attempt to be tamed. His hair honestly had a mind of its own. Not even his mother’s concentrated efforts could best it for more than a few minutes at a time. Steve waved his hands around his head as if he were trying to fend off a particularly determined mosquito ( _mom-squito_ ) until she left him alone, crossing her arms severely over her thin chest.

His shorter legs making it harder than it needed to be, Steve dashed forward to catch up with his father, the older man already halfway across the parking lot. As he fell into step with him, his father placed a firm hand on his shoulder. 

“We don’t run, Stephen.”

Well, certainly the elder Harrington didn’t run. Steve had never seen the man move at more than a reasonably brisk pace, but Steve ran all the time. He ran everywhere. His teachers were forever telling him to slow down, to focus, to concentrate, to stop screwing things up, why was he always screwing things up? ( _Why was he screwing Robin up?_ ) A million little thoughts and admonishments tried to distract him, but looking up into his father’s steely gaze Steve swallowed the lump that suddenly grew in his throat and asked his intended question. 

“Whatsa queer?” 

Cold grey eyes narrowed, casting his son another sharp glance. As they reached the pavement walkway that led up to the church his father drew him to a stop. 

“They are wrong. They are what happens when someone is raised wrong. Coddled. Spoilt.”

Steve nodded along eagerly, wanting to impress his father, to show that he understood. 

“You are a Harrington, never forget that. You are not weak. You are not like them,” his lips pursed up in disgust and Steve could only imagine what his father was picturing in his head, but Steve was seeing Bobby Grogan and his shy wave across the parking lot play out over and over again. An uncomfortable worm of anxiety crept into his stomach and buried itself there, twisting and turning until the memory made him sick just to think about. Bobby had wanted to be his friend, but Steve was a Harrington, and that mattered. To listen to his father speak, it was possibly the most important and central fact of Steve’s life, and he frequently was told to never forget it. It seemed like a puzzling request, since Steve regularly heard his last name called in class, and if anyone phoned his house he was supposed to answer ‘Harrington residence’, and to be very polite in case it was one of his father’s business associates. He wasn’t exactly likely to forget it.

Slowly over time he was becoming aware that having his particular last name might mean a whole lot more than just the letters it was spelled with (which Steve still got wrong on occasion, much to everyone’s dismay, especially his own. He didn’t know why, but letters were just so hard! It wasn’t fair.)

Harringtons were strong, smart, good at everything they did, and they had only the best of everything. His father would often complain in restaurants when he suspected his food wasn’t of high enough quality, or that he was being made to pay too much for wine that was ‘an infearer vintitch’, whatever that meant. In his young mind it made sense now that it meant his friends might also have to be the very best too. Bobby was ( _weakwrongqueer_ ) okay, but maybe he wasn’t good enough to be Steve’s friend. Determined now, he resolved that the next morning when he got to class he would watch all the other kids carefully and try to figure out which was the best, and make friends with them. Steve never had problems talking to others and he always got along well with the other students he went to school with. It shouldn’t be hard and he would make his father proud. 

Setting his face into a reasonable copy of the older man’s expression, Steve looked up with serious eyes and a deep frown that hurt the corners of his mouth to hold. “I’m not weak,” he affirmed gravely, excitedly catching the way his father’s eyes almost shone as soon as the words left his lips. “I’m not,” he screwed his mouth up even tighter and furrowed his brow, like how his father had when he saw Bobby Grogan waving. “Queer.”

The hand on his should clapped once, a solid thump that hurt and ached exactly like the love he felt for his father, and then it was gone. His father had wordlessly started walking again, greeting the priest at the door with a few gravelly utterances and a slight incline of his head, the only type of hello his father ever gave except a terse handshake to other businessmen. 

Face falling back into his usual expression, Steve breathed in deep and mumbled to himself once more. “I’m not weak. Not weak.” It felt good to say the words, to picture himself growing up big and strong like his father, a good man. A good _businessman._

“Indeed,” his mother said quietly behind him, almost causing Steve to jump out of his neatly pressed suit. Her eyes were glittering darkly as she stared down at him, no emotion he could put a name to on her perfectly made up face. Her dress whispered softly as she passed him, offering no explanation for her vague statement, and her heels clicked with sharp little beats as she too approached the priest to say hello. 

The worm in his stomach shifted again and Steve walked behind his parents silently, back straight and eyes forward. If Bobby Grogan waved again, or so much as looked at him, Steve was just going to ignore him. 

He didn’t need friends like Bobby, like a queer, like someone wrong, like he was wrong. He was so so wrong. He’d always been wrong about everything. His teachers had always known it, but they never said it to him, they said it to his parents, but they were wrong because he was a **HARRINGTON** , (his father’s voice again, raised, indignant, pushing his teacher down into her chair squirming with just a change in volume, in tone. It was the last parent teacher night they ever attended). 

He wasn’t wrong. He didn’t have a learning disability, he wasn’t dumb. He was just lazy. He just wasn’t trying hard enough. He wasn’t a bad student. He wasn’t a bad kid. His son never bullied anyone. So what if he called the Grogan boy a queer, it was true! Call a spade a spade James Harrington always said (and oh man did he also have a lot to say about _spades_ once he had a decent amount of scotch in him. The world was _changing_ and he had to _play_ _nice_ , but that didn’t mean he had to _like_ it.) Steve Harrington wasn’t a bully, wasn’t mean, wasn’t disabled, wasn’t any of the things those liberal bra-burning bitch teachers called him. He was lazy and entitled, sure, but he was popular and athletic and had a certain charm that managed to disarm even his would-be detractors. Sure, he wasn’t all his father had hoped for, but as he insisted he knew what Steve _wasn’t_ , the boy increasingly began to wonder what he _was_.

He thought those very words as he watched Tommy scrawl slurs about Nancy Wheeler on the side of a building. He thought those words as he called Jonathan Byers a queer and a bunch of other things as terrible and worse. He was still thinking them when Tommy and Carol tried to console him (what they would consider consoling, perhaps) after Byers had handed his ass to him. He didn’t have much of an answer. 

Steve Harrington was a person who had hurt the very first girl he loved because he was jealous and petty and because a fierce gravelly voice in the back of his head told him that Nancy deserved it for making him ( _a_ _Harrington!_ ) look like a fool, for thinking she could cheat on him. Another sharp twist in his gut and the worm that had grown uncomfortably large and uncomfortably _comfortable_ in his stomach made him come back to himself. A self he wasn’t sure he knew anymore. Seventeen year old Steve who lashed out first because it was better than becoming the perpetual victim his mother continued to be as his father fucked his way through an office’s worth of secretaries and executive assistants. Fifteen year old Steve who lost his virginity in Dina Gershon’s family room to a girl whose name he couldn’t even remember, but who wore too much makeup and vomited on his shoes after they’d finished. Twelve year old Steve who had a reputation for being cool and cruel in equal measure, tossing insults at less popular students with a slick sickening charm that only served to call like to like and single out those who just didn’t measure up. Eleven year old Steve who had ignored a boy waving from his pew, sat smiling between his parents, until Steve had resolutely turned his head away with a lack of subtlety that would’ve been hard to miss from space, and never spoke to him again. Ten year old Stevie (Your name is _Stephen_ , father’s voice echoed distantly) who had thought Bobby Grogan was pretty nice, had some really neat comics and who tasted vaguely like grape jelly the one time they had tried kissing like they’d seen adults do, trying to figure out why grown ups seemed to like it so much (it had honestly been kinda weird, and a little gross, sticky, but also a bit nice.) It had been their little secret. They would catch each other’s gaze across the classroom and both smile because they knew something nobody else did, something that was just theirs, and that had its own warm buzzing excitement attached to it. Had he ever been so young? He knew he had, but it felt so different from the person he’d become, the person who lived every day with the dull ache of the worm in his stomach and his father whispering constantly from the back of his head, always, always.

Except, he blinked and as he stared into Robin’s glassy dull eyes, filled with wetness and a resignation that had its teeth buried deep inside her heart, the only voice in his head for once was his own.

“Oh. Shit.”

A moment passed in silence once more until Steve broke it with the smallest huff of a laugh. He wasn’t laughing at Robin, or at Bobby (Rob and Bob, and how appropriate was that?), or even at himself for once. He laughed because for the first time in his life he saw just how small his father was. How utterly meaningless he was, last name and all. 

And as Steve scoffed and needled the girl across the stall from him for having laughable taste in women, he felt immense. A largeness that had nothing to do with anything he had been taught, and everything to do with how easy it was to give up his heart to people like Robin. She didn’t like him like he was starting to like her, and that was okay. Maybe this was something even better. Maybe nothing at all mattered except the fiery look in her eyes as she defended Tammy Thompson ( _seriously? Tammy Thompson??_ ), the resigned pain he’d seen earlier just a faint memory, at least for a moment. 

It’s more than enough to make Steve happy. He doesn’t need anything else. He’s not wrong. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know that fanon prefers to spell his name as Steven, but a pretentious upper middle class WASP family in the 80s would totally spell their kid’s name Stephen.


End file.
